TDD as if you Meant It: Refactoring to Builder (Episode 5)

The book Facilitating Technical Events is for technical trainers, coaches, events organizers who want to have a good event flow and happy attendees.

TDD as if you Meant It: Refactoring to Builder (Episode 5)

About

Cost of Change during evolution

There are some language structures that make Evolutionary Design difficult. One of them is the constructor. When I evolve the code, I often understand that one more parameter is needed for the constructor. Because of this I need to minimize the cost of change of the constructor. The best way I know to do that is by creating a builder. In this way I will call the constructor only once, in the builder. So my cost of change is really small.

Duplication

If I need to introduce a new design concept, I make sure before that I minimized the duplication connected to that new design concept. Calling new Board(…) many times is a clear sign of duplication. This duplication would make the code evolution considerably slower.

A builder is called fluent when it looks like playerBuilder.withName(“Adi”).withAge(7).withColor(“Red”).build(). If let’s say I need to introduce a new characteristic to my player, I can always add a new method to the PlayerBuilder. And I would have something like playerBuilder.withName(“Adi”).withAge(7).withColor(“Red”).withExperienceLevel(“Beginner”).build().

Having this type of builder also lets me have focused tests. I don’t want my test that needs only Age to contain Name. So I want to be able to have playerBuilder.withAge(34).build(). In this case all the values for all the other fields of Player will have a default value that is not generating any side-effects in the system. We could call this characteristic an idempotence of the builder.